Reposted from Time Asia. Thanks for the link to Blue Ear.
Gish Jen
On my family’s first visit to China in 1979, my sister got sick in Nanjing and had to be hospitalized. This was a special worry as, being Chinese-American, we were not able to get her into the best hospital in town. That hospital was for white foreigners–for “real” foreigners, including “real” Americans. We were, according to local officials, Overseas Chinese, who had to use the Overseas Chinese hospital. Argue as we might, there was no convincing anyone that such minor details as being born in America and carrying an American passport made you a true American. Blood, it seemed, was blood.
We found ourselves, therefore, in a hospital unlike any other we had ever experienced. There was no elevator; a doctor carried my sister upstairs on his back. The halls were full of watermelon rinds. The IV needles were rusty. When my mother pulled a Band-Aid from her purse, a group of nurses gathered to ooh and ah.
My sister, thankfully, recovered. But to this day I recall our helpless fury. I also recall discovering, when I returned to China in 1981 to teach in Shandong province, that most people I met had ideas about identity similar to those of the Nanjing officials. So though eager to return once more this past spring to witness the new China of cell phones and Frappuccinos, I was interested to learn, too, whether people’s ideas about identity had kept up with their environment.
I knew ideas about Chineseness were changing elsewhere in Asia. A few years ago in Hong Kong, for example, I had heard Chinese intellectuals question whether anyone was really Chinese anymore. After all, they joked, the Chinese in Hong Kong were so British, the Chinese in Taiwan so Japanese; the Chinese on the mainland so communist. Their tone was jocular, but their quandary was real–reflecting the notion that identity, in their view, resided at least as much in tradition as in blood. In contrast to the Nanjing officials I had confronted in the ’70s, these thinkers were completely able to accept the idea that a Chinese American could be a “real” American. Identity, for them, was clearly mutable. Less clear, though, was whether any part of one’s identity was a matter of choice–whether, in their view, one should or did have a say in one’s identity. Was not my Americanness, they asked, much like the former Britishness of Hong Kongers: a thing imposed?
I heard similar ideas expressed in Beijing this spring. When I visited a school for the children of migrant workers and introduced myself as an American, my interpreter–one of the teachers–refused to translate the sentence. “I think you are Chinese,” she told me, in English, insisting that because my parents were Chinese, I was too. To this I pointed out, of course, not only that I was “really” American but that my Chinese-born parents were now American too–yes, really! And when the teacher continued to refuse to translate, I finally just relayed to the students myself, in Chinese, what I had to say.
That teacher, though, was the exception rather than the rule. More often than not, people in Beijing readily accepted the idea that I was American. My students, for example, claimed anyone could tell I was American even from across the street. My “air,” they said, gave me away. A student said I was American the same way the Tibetans or the Hui–Chinese Muslims–were Chinese: as a result of a deep association and long-entwined history, which made blood a secondary factor.
Should it come as a surprise that notions of Chineseness are shaped by politics? China scholar Dru Gladney has traced how the Hui minority began as a collection of disparate Muslim groups whose “Muslimness” took vastly different forms but who were cobbled together into a nationality by the Chinese government. Its interest then was to attract international Muslim involvement, and corresponding investment. But now that certain Muslims have evinced separatist leanings–how inescapably Chinese these minorities are claimed to be! “You can always tell a Hui person,” my students said, “if you meet one.” “From their air?” I asked. “From their smell,” they said. “And yet they’re Chinese?” “Yes, Chinese,” they affirmed. “They have no choice.”
How often I heard in China, on this trip, that a person had no choice about his or her identity or some other matter–far more often than I did 20 years ago, when people had even less choice. I heard it so often that I modified my construction of what a Chinese is now to include: “A person who often has no choice and is acutely aware that others, elsewhere, do.” As for what it means to be an American in China today, was I not from that elsewhere? In the China of 20 years ago, Americans were rich people with machines–cars and refrigerators. (Yes, even I was American in that way, a foreign expert who could unhesitatingly identify a mysterious, cratered object in a fridge to be an egg rack.) Now we are people who have choices–people to whom the Chinese will frequently mention their lack of choice. We are specters of freedom.
Yet that we are more than that was highlighted by SARS. No one in my family fell sick on this trip, thank goodness. But had they, what a relief it was to know that they would now have unquestionably been treated in the same way as any other American. It did make us feel guilty to know we had access to better medical care than most Beijingers; but how lucky–how American–to feel that guilt.
And how acutely American I felt as the health crisis wore on–if nothing else, because my eating habits were so different from those of many Chinese. At dinner at the home of a cab driver and a factory worker, I was dismayed to find they did not generally dish food from communal bowls into their own bowls, but–even with the danger of SARS growing–helped themselves straight from the communal bowls. I had to ask to have my own bowl. Similarly, I could not help but feel aghast when a farmer in the countryside, seeing my teacup half full, insisted on filling it with tea from his own cup.
How American, too, my attitude toward Western news media. Most Chinese knew, of course, the China Daily to be government propaganda, but they viewed Western news sources as equally biased. Thus, during the early months of the epidemic, as we Westerners grew more and more alarmed, the Chinese I knew tended to discount the news coming over the Internet as so much China bashing. Not that they believed the Chinese media’s point-blank denial of the problem; they seemed to believe the truth lay at some midpoint between their news coverage and ours. How American to believe SARS presented a credible health threat; most Chinese I met seemed to regard SARS, in the early months, as a mental affliction of Westerners.
Does Americanness, like Chineseness, lie in our various proclivities–in our eating habits and assumptions, in our perceptual tendencies, in our predispositions to accept or reject certain sorts of information? Does identity consist of a host of daily practices that change and can be changed, some with great difficulty and some on a whim? It does seem so to me. Call me American: I came home from China convinced that we are made by culture, but that, every day, consciously or unconsciously, we make our culture too. As for blood, that is the red stuff that carries oxygen to our busy gray matter, enabling us to form and reform our conceptions of self and world.